“We are not amused.”
Miss Mia Sopaipilla is doing her Queen Victoria impression again, so you know it’s not going to be sunny and fiddy-sumpin’ today in The Duck! City.
Happily, it was sunny and fiddy-sumpin’ the past couple of days, so I was able to get out and about on a two-wheeler, in this case the Co-Motion Divide Rohloff.
My man Chris Coursey, a beach bum and journo who rose from his humble origins to become Santa Rosa’s mayor and then a Sonoma County supervisor, probably longs for the days when he had to drive to the California coast to see a few gajillion tons of water in motion.
Friday and Saturday marked my first off-road rides of 2023, and they were a nice change from running, which I will probably return to today, if I can pull myself together in time to beat the rain to the punch.
Yes, the wizards are predicting rain, and even a small chance of snow, so I guess we’re getting a little spillover from the atmospheric rivers that have been drenching the West Coast.
I’ve never had to contend with weather like that, and I hope to keep that lucky streak unbroken. It makes the occasional four-foot Colorado snowstorm look like a day at the beach with a cold sixer and a hot girl.
Tags: atmospheric river, Chris Coursey, Co-Motion Divide Rohloff, Miss Mia Sopaipilla, Santa Rosa, Sonoma County
Mad Blog Media 
January 15, 2023 at 9:16 am |
My guitar buddy’s home town is Santa Cruz, and they lived in San Jose for many years before retirement. Although their holiday trip to the Bay Area was wet, it was nothing like what Chris is getting now. The planet is on fire, except in Santa Rosa right now. Hopefully the forest fires will take a break this year after this wet winter.
First bike I would “appropriate” from your stable is the Jones. But that Co-motion is a close second.
January 15, 2023 at 11:31 am |
I just texted with my pals Chris and Merrill in Santa Rosa and they say they’re doing a’ight. Pretty up there in the wine country, but they have had their challenges in recent years.
The folks down to Monterey County are taking a beating too, along with the Tahoe area. And now Flagstaff is talking about getting maybe two feet of snow? The wizards are still talking rain here but I think they may need to apply a little Windex to their crystal ball.
That Co-Motion is a fine machine for these parts. The bars aren’t so wide that I can’t squeeze through the narrow trailhead gates and the low end is lower than a New York Republican’s standard for truth-telling. Good for the elderly knees.
January 16, 2023 at 7:57 am |
Patrick, you reminded me of something rattling around in the back of my head from some prior reading I did back when I had a brain. Here is a interesting article, at the link below, about the geologic history of catastrophic (to human) atmospheric river storms in California. The really bad ones apparently happen, statistically, every couple hundred years and flood low lying inland areas. In 1861 it rained for 43 days straight and flooded the Central Valley, including the state capitol. So this is not a new meteorological cycle but as Lynn Ingram (geosciences, UC Berkeley) says, might well get worse with a warming ocean coupled with ground subsidence in California caused by groundwater pumping. Imagine the 1861 Pineapple Mega-Express with the current Central Valley thirty feet lower than it was back then.
https://nexusmedianews.com/the-deep-history-of-californias-catastrophic-flooding-33534fc14a9f/
January 16, 2023 at 9:29 am |
Good lookin’ out there, Hoss. My man Chris was working for The Press Democrat back in 1986, when that Russian River flood photo was taken. I expect he remembers it.
We live in interesting times, do we not? This morning’s post takes note of two stories about Scottsdale putting a cork in water sales to Rio Verde Foothills because they just ain’t enough to go around.
Too much here, too little there … where’s the Goldilocks Country at?